A blandly cynical distrust of human nature was the result of
his most piercing glances into the human soul. He had humor, and
sometimes humor of a delicious kind; but this sunshine of the soul was
but sunshine breaking through or lighting up a sombre and ominous
cloud. There was also observable in his earlier stories a lack of vigor,
as if the power of his nature had been impaired by the very
process--which gave depth and excursiveness to his mental vision.
Throughout, the impression is conveyed of a shy recluse, alternately
bashful in disposition and bold in thought, gifted with original and
various capacities, but capacities which seemed to have developed
themselves in the shade, without sufficient energy of will or desire to
force them, except fitfully, into the sunlight. Shakspeare calls
moonlight the sunlight _sick_; and it is in some such moonlight of the
mind that the genius of Hawthorne found its first expression. A mild
melancholy, sometimes deepening into gloom, sometimes brightened into a
"humorous sadness," characterized his early creations. Like his own
Hepzibah Pyncheon, he appeared "to be walking in a dream"; or rather,
the life and reality assumed by his emotions "made all outward
occurrences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of an unconscious
slumber.
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